Recovering Journalist

The AP–Of All Places–As News Industry Think-Tank

The Associated Press has taken a beating in some quarters lately over perceptions–largely misguided, I believe–that it's somehow competing online with its newspaper members. Not only does this reflect a misunderstanding of what the AP does, but a lot of critics seem to forget that AP is owned by those newspapers. It's a rare example of newspaper ownership of a savvy online player, and a lot better than the alternative (think: Reuters. Or Google).

One of the reasons AP is taking some heat, frankly, is because it's been especially aggressive and innovative in embracing online media. Once incredibly stodgy, AP's leadership now seems to be on the cutting edge in how it thinks about the new world of journalism. Go figure.

The latest example of that is a fascinating research report released recently by the news cooperative. "A New Model For News" slipped out of the AP a few weeks ago and has gotten very little coverage in the industry media. But it reads like a roadmap for what news organizations–and especially newspapers–should be doing to regain their competitiveness, especially with young readers.

The report is based on detailed interviews and observations of young (20ish) readers in the U.S., Britain and India. Not surprisingly, it finds out that kids don't read newspapers. No news there. But it does show that they've got real interest in news, and are going to all sorts of sources besides print to find out what's going on in the world.

You should read it, but I'll briefly summarize: TV, Web sites and mobile alerts are popular with these young news consumers. So is news exchanged via social interactions (online and offline) with friends and co-workers. (Missing from the report: Any mention of Twitter, but that may have to do with the timing of the basic user research, which is now a year old.) Interestingly, the young folks interviewed generally don't think they're getting enough depth in their news. The detailed profiles of the various young readers and their news habits are quite interesting–and depressing if you're still betting on print.

Yeah, yeah, you're saying, we know all that: Kids use non-traditional news sources. But what are traditional news sources, i.e. newspapers, doing about it? Not a hell of a lot. Most papers haven't done anything particularly interesting with video (traditional TV, not just Web video), mobile alerts, and even now-"standard" technologies such as e-mail newsletters and RSS. The industry's track record on these vital new media is pretty sad.

Not to worry: The AP report provides a veritable cookbook of "new models" for news production and distribution, including:

• Tying news delivery more closely to e-mail. Clearly, these readers want news pushed to them. They want to be alerted when something is going on that they care about (gee, maybe they're news junkies more than anyone thought!), and they want to be able to do it simultaneous with checking their e-mail or text messages. That means more e-mail products, mobile products and distribution via things like instant-messaging and RSS. 
• Deliver to the technologies these readers live with. Seems obvious, but again, most newspapers and their Web sites are still publishing most of their news the old-fashioned way. These readers are looking at TV, their phones and PDAs, and other, fresher technologies (a surprising number don't even have computers at home, or dismiss the computer as more of a time-waster). That's where news needs to be delivered, with the same quality and aggressiveness of traditional outlets. (AP is walking the walk on this: its AP Mobile News app is one of the snazzier of the new iPhone apps.)
• Don't underestimate television. It's still a significant form of news delivery for these consumers. That suggests that newspapers need to find ways to move their brands onto TV (what is this, 1955?). Online video is one thing–and it's important–but regular TV is still a very viable medium for these young readers, and newspapers don't reach them there.
• Give them depth. This one's a bit of a surprise, but clearly these young readers are frustrated by the thinness of the news they're getting. I think the secret here is to give them the option to go deeper if they like–but not to force depth on them. Products need to offer both brief and long versions that readers can choose.
• News consumption is increasingly multitasked. Translation: These news consumers want information they can access while they're doing something else, rather than having to focus intently on, say, a newspaper or Web site. They're getting news while driving or while doing other things. That means news organizations need to find ways to wedge news products into those activities rather than demanding 100 percent attention (young readers will give that if they're more interested in depth).
• A bit of news fatigue is setting in. With news coming from many directions, these consumers feel overloaded by information. This argues for well-crafted, focused news reports that maximize the amount of information delivered and provides it in high quality. Sounds like a business newspapers should know well–but it needs to happen in different media than paper.
• News is social currency. It's "cool" for these kids to know something their friends don't, and then to be the source of that news, or for them to be conversant with their friends and colleagues about what's going on in the world. That's an old-fashioned value that appears to still hold with these new audiences.

Again, you should read the entire report and think about how your company's products should be refocused to better serve this audience–which, of course, is the audience of the future. You've got to build products that that audience wants, not just creating (print) products for an audience that is aging rapidly (you know how that story ends). Clearly, from the AP report, even news Web sites aren't enough–and may remind them too much of their print forebears. There's a real need for a fresh approach to news, from reporting to delivery.

Moreover, one of the most interesting and profound statements in the report is from an AP editor who says, "We're reporting what is happening, not what has happened."

That's a critical change in tense, and very smart thinking. Everyone in the newspaper and new media business should be pondering it. Yes, it's a rougher first draft of history than many journalists are used to, or even comfortable with. But in an era of technology-driven news immediacy, it's exactly the right philosophy to have, especially to reach the younger news consumers who are subjects of the AP research report. 

All of AP's member newspapers should be closely examining "A New Model for News" and looking for ways to build products that exploit its findings. After all, they paid for the research. They might as well take advantage of it.

Update: On a related note, the Newspaper Association of America just released a good primer about what newspapers should be doing with mobile publishing. It all seems so obvious–but there really aren't a lot of good newspaper mobile efforts out there, much less any that really try to make money on it. It's a big opportunity.

It's the Election, Stupid

It's a Presidential election year, about as big a news story as there can be. But too many news organizations still are not doing a particularly good or innovative job of providing online campaign coverage that goes beyond standard print and broadcast coverage.

In fact, it's taken a startup site to redefine campaign coverage in this Presidential cycle. The remarkable FiveThirtyEight.com is providing daily updates of polling activity and adding sophisticated statistical analysis tools to attempt to track and project what's happening among the ever-changing electorate. 

While most mainstream media sites still are fixated on essentially meaningless national voter polls, FiveThirtyEight.com is breaking down state-by-state results to attempt to chart what's going to happen in the all-important Electoral College (the site's name refers to the number of Electoral College votes up for grabs). Poll data is weighted based on the pollster's past record of accuracy. And the site applies tools like regression analysis and similarity scores to attempt to bring clarity to the mass of numbers it collects.

Who's behind FiveThirtyEight.com? A guy named Nate Silver, whose day job is being one of the principals behind legendary baseball statistics site Baseball Prospectus. (Silver invented the legendary baseball player stat-projection tool, PECOTA.) 

Silver is bringing the kinds of advanced statistical analysis beloved of baseball stats geeks to the Presidential political arena, and the results are revelatory. He's even run 10,000 simulations of the election to try to project the outcome, and constantly changes his probability estimates of various outcomes based on the latest polling data. At the moment Silver thinks there's 17.44 percent chance of an Obama landslide, a 3.98 percent chance that McCain could lost Ohio yet win the election, and a 0.82 percent chance of an electoral college tie.

This is heady stuff, especially when most major news organizations' idea of sophisticated political coverage is pretty much limited to reporter blogs. How 2004. Last time around, ABC News' The Note defined campaign coverage, and naturally, this year every major news site has its own version–The Fix, The Trail, The Caucus, Top of the Ticket, etc. Some are very good. But they're still pretty conventional, especially compared to what Silver is doing. Also conventional: Politico, the much-ballyhooed politics Web site/newspaper startup from two former Washington Post reporters that's quickly become a player on the national political news scene. Politico is solid, but it's still basically a newspaper on a screen (disclosure: I did some pre-launch consulting for Politico).

FiveThirtyEight.com is not the only one exploring new ways of looking at the election, but other good examples are few and far between. A handful of others worth checking out:

• PolitiFact.com, by the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, whose Truth-o-Meter is a clever way to look at the back and forth between candidates. PolitiFact is very witty and engaging about holding the candidates accountable for their statements, matched only by The Daily Show's masterful use of videos that catch contradictory statements. WashingtonPost.com has tried something sort of similar with its FactChecker blog, but FactChecker is inexplicably taking the summer off. Don't they know there's an election coming up? 
• Patchwork Nation, by the Christian Science Monitor, an interesting way to try to move election coverage away from the Washington vortex. Based on 11 blogs from around the country, each attempting to represent a different voter interest group (Evangelical Epicenters, Immigration Nation, Tractor Country, and so on) Patchwork Nation offers a different perspective, for sure. But I wish it had gone farther, and opened itself up to blogs and contributions from readers all over the nation, not just those 11 blogs. That would really bring the patchwork map that dominates the site to life. Still, it's a good effort to get beyond the usual political coverage.
• Poligraph, by HealthCentral.com (another former client) does an interesting job of tracking the candidates' positions on health care issues, with an easy to understand interactive graphic tool. You can even compare your own stance on various health issues with the candidates'. Extra credit: HealthCentral has made it easy for other sites to add Poligraph to their political coverage as an embeddable widget. One only wishes there were similar tools for other major issues.
• YouDecide, by San Francisco public TV station KQED, offers a smart interactive tool that both assesses your stands on various issues and challenges your position through a series of questions. It's an interesting approach, and it's also available for embedding in other sites (hint: embeddable widgets like this are a great way to spread a brand name).

Other than that, the list of interesting political coverage efforts is pretty thin. There are various versions of electoral maps and campaign finance databases, and WashingtonPost.com–which should be the ESPN.com of politics but never seems to rise to that level–does have a candidate-travel tracking tool, an issues-tracker (powered by DayLife) that seems out of date (it still lists Mike Gravel as a candidate), and a few rudimentary Facebook widgets (again, spreading the brand).

But FiveThirtyEight right now is way ahead in the election coverage innovation polls. But there could be a dark horse: Google did an incredible map-based site to cover last year's Australian election. If the company has something similar coming for the U.S. Presidential race (with less than three months to go, it had better get cracking), all those campaign blogs are going to look even more like also-rans.

The End of Mass

Stowe Boyd has a good post on hyperlocal that touches on something I've said before: hyperlocal has to be a "fully edged phenomenon," drawing from a variety of the hyperlocal models we've seen so far.

But then Boyd segues into something even better: a discourse on how newspapers simply don't understand that their previous model of being all things to all audiences is permanently broken.

What the newspapers' management fail to understand is the end of mass: people simply do not hold with mass identity now that they are free to find human-scale identity, and once they find it, they will not go back. Newspapers and other mass media is falling first and fastest because we are rejecting the erstatz, mass belonging that they offered, as part of the expansion of the industrial Western democratic ideals. 

Newspapers–and other media–just can't keep following the old playbook of publishing for a general audience. The audience is rejecting that model and wants more specificity—products that are mostly useful to them, not mostly thrown away. (What percentage of the newspaper do you actually read, anyway? What a waste!)

Just as the magazine industry fragmented in the late 1960s and early 1970s from general-interest titles like Life and Look into specialty titles for every audience under the sun, newspapers have to find new ways to target key audiences with focused products. Those audiences may be geographic or they may be demographic. But the era of the large-scale, regional, mass-market newspaper is over, as painfully demonstrated by declining advertising and circulation numbers. 

The sooner newspaper publishers and editors recognize that, and move on to competing in niches within their own markets, the sooner they'll start to pull out of the current death spiral. Mass just doesn't cut it anymore.

Computational Journalism

When you have the daily news meeting in your newsroom, are there programmers or tech people sitting at the table?

Really? Why not?

It's a given that representatives from the photo and graphics department are there, to talk about ways to tell stories visually. And I sure hope your Web producers are regular attendants at news meetings, to talk about how coverage should be coordinated online–and what people are reading on the Web site.

But few if any papers also bring their code-writers in to hear and talk about that day's top stories. And that's too bad, because they could be helping you break ground in storytelling and information presentation.

Look around the Web–not at newspaper sites–and you'll see interesting things being done with maps, data-mining, flash graphics, social media and other Web 2.0 tools. These should be in the regular arsenals for newspapers and their Web sites, but too often they're afterthoughts, or relegated to big projects. Call it "computational journalism"–taking advantage of these technological tools to communicate news and information to readers in new ways.

Just as a good photo or graphics editor can suggest an interesting visual approach, a smart programmer who's facile in these Web 2,0 technologies may be able to come up with a fresh way to plot a story on a Google map, or to whip up a quick flash graphic that can explain what words (or photos or graphics) cannot. Smart programmers think about information in fresh ways that can reinvent the way news and information are presented. Even something as simple as an audio or video link or an online discussion or reader forum can add greatly to a story.

Your online readers expect no less, because they see examples of the technologies underlying computational journalism all around them. They may be clicking from your site to smart new computational journalism sites like Adrian Holovaty's EveryBlock, which is grabbing information from databases, news sources and other places and mashing it up with maps and other tools to provide fascinating new ways to look at city life. Or they may be clicking to Outside.In, which automatically culls local information from blogs and other sources and creates deep wells of local news and information that newspapers can only dream about. Or they may be clicking to Zillow, which combines maps, tax information and a bit of clever programming to track home values throughout the nation. (At least some newspapers are now partnering with Zillow for more advanced home-sale classifieds, but it demonstrates what can be done with computational journalism, as well.) 

And of course your readers are spending time on social sites like Facebook, video sites like YouTube and photo sites like Flickr–all of which do things that most newspaper sites can't begin to match. All of a sudden, the print newspaper and largely static Web site look might old-fashioned–stodgy, even—by comparison.

Readers take these sort of technologies for granted in their daily Web experience, and it's vital that newspaper sites break out of the traditional words/photo/graphics paradigm to start thinking in similar ways and adopting computational journalism. You can do that by making your smart programmers equal partners in thinking about how news should be covered on a daily basis. They're going to have ideas you never even dreamed of. And that's a good thing.

The Mother of All Web Strategies

Not all newspaper companies are utterly bereft of new ideas and innovation. It just seems that way. But Gannett–yes, Gannett–continues to lead the way in thinking outside the newsprint box. And one way it's doing so is by going after a big, obvious demographic slice: local moms.

With little fanfare, Gannett has launched 60 sites in its various markets aimed at mothers and their interests, needs and passions. Two of the biggest and best are IndyMoms and CincyMoms, in Indianapolis and Cincinnati, respectively. These sites are largely user-generated–moms sharing tips, questions, photos, events, experiences, even prayers. Dive in and you see questions about pregnancy, places to vacation with kids, shopping sales, favorite movies, you name it. 

Best of all, the Gannett sites have great, friendly, funky designs that are informal and encourage audience participation—which appears to be happening in droves. And not surprisingly, advertisers are chasing these audiences as well, though the sites aren't yet blockbuster moneymakers. But clearly, there's an appeal to local and national advertisers who want to reach the motherhood market.

Gannett's not the only one experimenting with "mommy blogs." There are countless independent sites for mothers, and papers such as Boston.com (BoMoms.com) and startups such as TodaysMama.com are going after the same audience. I happen to think Gannett's doing a far better job with its friendly, informative, entertaining sites (BoMoms and TodaysMama, for instance, don't have a fraction of the verve and personality of the Gannett sites, and that's reflected in what appears to be tepid participation on those sites). 

IndyMoms, CincyMoms and their sister sites are great examples of what newspaper and other media companies should be doing more of: Getting beyond the traditional broad-bush, one-size-fits-all mass media model and targeting niches. In a way, these are variations on hyperlocal sites, adding content aimed at a specific local demographic. Local news operations should be building targeted sites like this for any sizable local demographic or interest group: sports fans, the military, large employers, the local music scene, whatever. Oh, and local communities, of course. 

Providing these audiences specific information and customized forums–and user-generated content and participation are essential for sites like these–is a way to put deep hooks into large local audiences and to attract high-CPM advertisers who want to reach those audiences. Gannett's moms' sites shouldn't be industry curiosities or interesting experiments–they should be an industry norm.

The New Philly.com

When I took a temporary gig as VP-Editorial at Philly.com a few months ago, I wrote that I probably wouldn't be able to say much in this blog about what we were doing while we rethought the site. Well, now I can: We launched the new version of Philly.com this weekend, and I think we've broken some important new ground in what it means to be a newspaper Web site.

To start with, the new Philly.com doesn't look like most other news Web sites. It doesn't have an endless collection of text links on the home page. Instead, it's got a clean, elegant design (by the good folks at the Philadelphia office of Avenue A/Razorfish) that highlights important content and is designed to move readers deeper into the site to find more. It makes very strong use of photos and video, in addition to text. It uses photo-illustrations of Philadelphia landmarks at the top of most pages so that there's no question that you're on a site about Philadelphia. In short, the new Philly.com has a strong personality and identity—unlike most newspaper sites, which generally lack local identity.

But those are just the cosmetics. Philly.com also tries to rethink what it is to be a newspaper site. Yes, the excellent content of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News is front and center. But the site is not just about news. It's also full of guidance to living and visiting in the Philadelphia region, including events calendar searches on every page, to help readers find out what's going on around town besides what's in that day's news.

More importantly, Philly.com finally breaks free of being a one-way lecture to the audience. It's bristling with calls to action for reader participation, in comments, discussions, user-submitted reviews, photo and video uploading and other user-generated content. Highlights of that reader content are displayed on just about every page, so that visitors are invited to talk amongst themselves about what's on the site and what's going on around them. I don't think any news site as gone this far in encouraging reader involvement. Underlying this is an industrial-strength comment-management system that minimizes the amount of work the staff has to do to police all of this user interaction.

On top of that we've got dozens of reporter and columnist blogs, a growing number of video elements and shows, ubiquitous horizontal navigation to keep readers moving around the site, some cool tools from Aggregate Knowledge to help readers see what others like them are interested in, and much more.

And this is really only the beginning. As with any redesign and relaunch there were a few things that didn't make the deadline, most notably some social features, which will be phased in over the next few months. Philly.com will continue to grow and improve, but it's already light years ahead of where it was before this redesign. (For a glimpse at what it used to look like, see the screen-grab at left. The change is really dramatic.)

There are a number of people who deserve great credit for the new site, starting with Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney and Philly.com President Eric Grilly, who have strong ambitions for what the site can be and how it has to move from simply being a "newspaper site;" the aforementioned Avenue A/Razorfish, which delivered a great design (further polished by Jill Hoover and Jeff Aiken); Jennifer Musser-Metz, who did an incredible job project-managing the design and launch process; and the talented and hard-working production and tech teams at Philly.com, who brought it all together and will keep the site evolving and growing over the next weeks and months.

As you can tell, I'm very proud of what's been accomplished with the new Philly.com, and I'll be excited to see it get even better in the future. We're defining what makes a great newspaper site. Up next: Philly.com does hyperlocal. Watch this space.

The Future of Facebook

A group of us were talking about Facebook today, and we kicked around a bit the idea of what Facebook could become. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, and I have a theory that could be significant for news organizations.

It goes like this: Facebook, which already functions as the default home page for a lot of people, could morph into something really powerful: a sort of highly personalized personal portal/home page, bringing together the utility of My Yahoo with the intimate personal power of Facebook's social networking roots.

Imagine being able to alight on Facebook and find out not only what your friends are up to, but what's going on in the world, in sports, in your neighborhood, with your investments, even the local weather. That means adding to Facebook's existing friend-based "news feed" the ability to include broader feeds, perhaps even from traditional news providers. Voila: The public and personal Daily Me, all on the same page.

It would require some rethinking on the part of Facebook's leadership, but that's long overdue anyway: As Facebook's audience has grown from its college-student base to a much broader, more mature group, the platform has really failed to evolve substantially. It still very much reflects its college-age roots, and its much-touted apps and widgets oddly are more visible to other people than they are to the people who add them to their pages. If I add a news widget to my page, it's great that you can see it—but I'd sure like to be able to see it too, on my main news feed page. At the moment, Facebook doesn't always work that way.

Media companies already are circling around Facebook and its 60 million-plus members, trying to figure out how to reach them with their content. So far, that's mostly consisted of fairly feeble attempts at news quizzes or other widgets. But the ability to add local or national or topical feeds to member pages would be powerful stuff (and have some significant advertising potential as well). It will be interesting to see if Facebook can evolve this way.

And by the way, if you're not already on Facebook, get on it and use it. It's not enough to just look around and think you've figured it out. Facebook's power and magic is only apparent if you start using it as intended, to link to friends and keep up with what they're doing on the service (and off it). It's a profound new way of exchanging information, and every journalist or person in the media business should be deeply familiar with it.

Right and Wrong

Required reading: Three great posts by Howard Owens (who's on fire lately) about what online news organizations should be (or are) doing right. Speaking of "on fire," here's a great read from Rob Curley about how the Las Vegas Sun aced breaking news online last week.

And on the other side of the ledger, a terrific post by Robert Niles about what newspapers are doing wrong.

Thinking Strategically

Howard Owens has an excellent post about how journalists need to learn to think strategically. It's an excellent example of what I mean by the phrase "recovering journalist"—there's now a lot more to being a journalist than ink-stained wretchery. Howard's money quote:

In the olden days, when newspapers were essentially monopolies, competition was scarce and the profits were rolling in unabated, publishers could afford to employ journalists who pontificated in smokey, after-work barrooms about the purity of their craft. No strategic business discussions allowed.

Those days are buried under a pile of rusting manual typewriters.

Nowadays, especially when you’re working online, you must think about more than the journalistic value of the story, but also ask questions like — where does this fit into our overall online strategy (do we even have a strategy)?, and how will this help grow and retain audience?

At Philly.com this week, I shared the digital division's 2008 high-level strategy document with all our producers, so they could understand where our leadership is trying to take the business. That may have been a first. In the next few days, we'll be discussing a detailed 2008 editorial strategy for the Web site. It's important for everyone in the operation to understand the big picture and where they fit into it. I'm afraid that in today's fear-and-loathing-filled newsroom environment, with so many closed-door meetings at newspapers about budget cuts and the future, there's less and less transparency about what's going on and what's being planned. That's not good. (Notable exception: The San Jose Mercury News' very public internal conversation about change. Bravo.) Worse, too often the newsroom staff isn't involved in the thinking about the future.

It's an axiom of good business management that the people on the front lines understand more about how to improve the business than the people in the executive offices. Far too often, however, none of the bosses think to ask the rank-and-file for suggestions, or what they think, or even to share the operation's overall vision—even after the strategy is set.

Everybody, at all levels, needs to be thinking strategically and fully understanding where things are headed. You know the cliches: We're all in this together. Divided we fall. In unity there is strength. There are reasons those are cliches: They're true! So news managements: Involve your staff and share your vision. And news staffers: Learn to think strategically and understand how what you're doing can drive the product and business forward into the future.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wikipedia

Over the past few weeks, I've found myself having almost-identical conversations with several journalists. The gist: Wikipedia has become an essential reference work for them.

Yeah, yeah, it's user-generated, and just about anybody can make changes in it, and there are a variety of Wikipedia-abuse horror stories. Of course. But what these excellent journalists were saying is that those issues are trivial compared to the benefits of having such a comprehensive source of information on just about everything imaginable.

Wikipedia's hardly a new phenomenon—it's been around (and terrific) for years. But the journalists I've talked to are catching up to what millions already know: It has clearly matured into a valuable tool for people (journalists and otherwise) looking for a fast overview of information on subjects large and small, obvious and obscure. Would any of these journalists go to print (or web) with something they found on Wikipedia? Of course not, not without independent confirmation. But as a fast, easy, omnibus knowledge-lookup tool, there's simply nothing like it. If the accuracy rate is 95% (and it's probably a lot better than that), that's fine, for the purposes it's being used for. For more definitive information, you'll look elsewhere--or do some reporting.

Wikipedia's also become a very good news-reporting service. Check it on a breaking story. The ability Wikipedia members to assemble a complete and thorough report on something current is rather amazing. To pick something from today's headlines, look at the Wikipedia entry on murdered Washington Redskins player Sean Taylor. You really couldn't ask for a better digest of this complicated story.

And yes, Virginia, Wikipedia is created and curated entirely by its users. That blows a lot of journalists' minds. You mean there are no professional editors? Nope--it's other users who are checking and changing and fine-tuning (often constantly) the contents. There are even well-organized systems in place to prevent the abuse that's become folklore. That's a tribute to the wisdom of the crowds that Wikipedia is based in—and another reason why so many of us are jazzed about the potential of user-generated content.

If you're a journalist who automatically poo-poos Wikipedia because of stereotypes that it's out-of-control amateur hour, look (and think) again. As the smart journalists I've been talking to lately realize, it long ago became a very powerful and useful basic research tool—and another example of how the Internet is demolishing our preconceived notions about how information is created.